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No More Left for Defense, Foreign Policy

Original Article

It’s hard to find out what Obamacare will actually cost the national budget. It takes a sense of humor to believe it will save money, as the Administration pretends. The Congressional Budget Office does not use dynamic scoring (that is, it doesn’t figure in the changes that tax and spending make to personal and business behavior), yet last March the CBO estimated a ten year cost addition of $l.6 trillion dollars. It may be $500 billion more now.

That all is on top of the burden on growing entitlement spending (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, pensions, education, etc.). Discovery fellow Scott Powell points out that those add up to $2.5 trillion, equal to all the revenue the federal government generates. That means that everything else the government spends on–including defense ($650 billion) and foreign policy (State Department, AID, etc.) and transportation and infrastructure are being financed by borrowing. That will come to about $1.1 trillion to $1.3 trillion this year.

The left thereby is achieving the aim of making our economy more like that of Europe–heavily taxed and regulated (we actually are becoming more regulated than Europe), spending everything we generate on entitlements and digging a huge hole for our children. The difference? The Europeans already have dropped out of defense spending. They are counting on us!

Bruce Chapman

Cofounder and Chairman of the Board of Discovery Institute
Bruce Chapman has had a long career in American politics and public policy at the city, state, national, and international levels. Elected to the Seattle City Council and as Washington State's Secretary of State, he also served in several leadership posts in the Reagan administration, including ambassador. In 1991, he founded the public policy think tank Discovery Institute, where he currently serves as Chairman of the Board and director of the Chapman Center on Citizen Leadership.